Comments

I think you should change the name of the show to,”The Dave and Chris Winge, and Off Topic Hour”.
Although I do find it fun when Dave goes on a tirade about some shit and Chris just takes it in the shorts until Dave is either “talked out” or Chris finds a way to change the topic.

thanks for taking time to make the podcast guys. Just my opinion, but I would have loved to hear more about electronics. Chris, I really liked how you connected the space program to engineering and electronics. I also wish that you could have had more time to tell us about this Maxim insider because it’s been a relevant topic on theamphour before.

Good on Dave for putting his family first, it was actually rather touching to hear him basically tell us all to go-root-ourselves because his family came first. I respect that a lot.

I know its hard for you two to schedule these podcasts each week with the time differences between you, so we will take what we can get. But, please, if you can talk more about the the maxim insider next week, it would be very appreciated.

Best wishes and keep up the good work guys. We are fortunate that you produce this show for us, for free, every week, forget about those who aren’t thankful but please do take kind and constructive suggestions into consideration.

Your comment was nicer than the one above, so I’ll respond to you. I think the fact of the matter is that Dave and I are doing less electronics stuff these days. The question comes down to whether we should just skip doing a show when something comes up like this week when we are both short on time and material. Is it better to not keep contact one week to the next (and make a bit of a stinker of a show) or is it better to just leave our listeners hanging. Personally, I use The Amp Hour to catch up with my buddy and everyone gets to listen, so even if we didn’t record, I’d optimally still get to hang out with Dave and chat.

Longer term, the solution is for both of us to do more electronics. Dave hiring an assistant will help as will my restarting Contextual Electronics. But I’m guessing the best solution is that we keep doing what we’re doing, accept that some weeks won’t be that great and hope for better next time.

I’ve just listened to the entire backlog up from Episode #1 as a background to everything from work to study to home renovations so now I feel pretty anxious about having to wait a whole week between shows. I’ll say that I’d rather you keep up the frequency without missing a beat even if some shows aren’t as relevant as others.

It was pretty interesting reflecting on recent topics through your weekly discussions, the two most interesting storylines that stand out when listening through in a compressed timeframe was:

1. The initial excitement about Kickstarter followed by a gradual souring based on the increase of badly designed or downright dishonest projects.

I love listening in on your random conversations! I’d really hate to see the show fall apart because you got out of the habit of recording a weekly show.

Sure, I’d prefer electronics content, but after a couple years, I look forward to you two guys chatting more than the knowledge I gain along the way.

If you really have to reduce your commitment, whatever you do, stay consistent! If it has to be just once or twice a month, that can work, but the quickest way to kill a show is to just record when you feel like it. Listeners will stop looking forward to it and many will stop listening as you start to treat it more as an optional event rather than a scheduled task.

Shorter podcasts or podcasts with less electronics content are FAR better for maintaining listeners and maintaining quality than unpredictable scheduling in the long run.

A quick note on slow robots — while really complicated humanoid robots might be slowed down by the complexity of required balancing calculations, most cool demonstrations of robots and robotic arms you see on YouTube are going to be slow for safety.

A lot of the money in robotics is in industrial processes where speed is critical, but speed comes with extremely high power and very little time to respond to unexpected situations or programming errors. Programmers work very hard to prevent all unexpected errors, and the ones I’ve worked with get pretty close to eliminating crashes (arms or motors hitting hard stops or other more important things like people) but as we all know, it’s very difficult to eliminate all programming errors.

These robots can often kill a person just by accelerating normally into their body or head, so they are often designed to move at a very slow speed when shielding is removed or people are within the operational area. Both of these conditions are often met when demonstration videos are being recorded. Further, a lot of demonstrations are for “cool” activities, not industrial production so it’s likely that less time has gone into carefully vetting the programming.

Slowing down the robots with strict speed and acceleration limits both gives people time to react and get out of the way if they are in danger and reduces the damage to the robot, people or other hardware if the robot crashes into something.

Obviously I’m not commenting on any specific video here, and there are many exceptions where robots are moving quickly or they were never designed to move quickly in the first place. Frankly, most faster robotic operations I’ve seen or heard of are extremely specialized and confidential and would never be shown publicly. If most expensive fast industrial robots are being treated as confidential or even trade secret, it could have a significant impact on what sorts of demonstration videos we can find on the internet.